Thanks for the additional info, Dennis. Just for the record, I just asked my husband if he knew what parchment was made from.... he said "bark?" Guess ignorance is as ignorance does.

And he conflated parchment with papyrus, too. It's an easy enough mistake to make. And most folks have no particular need to know such things, nor an opportunity to learn. Why should they? Unless you're in the publishing, printing, or paper making industries, it's not something you are likely to encounter

I knew of the standard sizes for books - quarto, octavo, et al, but hadn't known that the starting sheet size was determined by the available area of an average sheep skin back then.

Books now are normally produced on sheet fed offset presses, with the same sort of folds and trim to produce the final book size, and the same terms applied, but paper substitutes for parchment.
______Dennis

No, during a walk in the desert what one gets is an elephant on the head - if you aren't careful and do your walk between 4 and 5 pm, when they do there parachute exercises.

I heard about a US effort during the Vietnam War called Operation Barroom, intended to paradrop an elephant into a remote Vietnamese village for ceremonial purposes. You can strap parachutes to an elephant and parachute it out a plane. The trick is getting it to step out of the plane in flight. That reportedly required heavy duty tranquilization of the animal, and a side effect of the tranqs was extreme flatulence.

I heard about a US effort during the Vietnam War called Operation Barroom, intended to paradrop an elephant into a remote Vietnamese village for ceremonial purposes. You can strap parachutes to an elephant and parachute it out a plane. The trick is getting it to step out of the plane in flight. That reportedly required heavy duty tranquilization of the animal, and a side effect of the tranqs was extreme flatulence.

The cargo bay crew wore gas masks during the mission.
______Dennis

I would have thought the first difficulty to be getting the animal on the plane

And he conflated parchment with papyrus, too. It's an easy enough mistake to make. And most folks have no particular need to know such things, nor an opportunity to learn. Why should they? Unless you're in the publishing, printing, or paper making industries, it's not something you are likely to encounter

I can't remember ever not knowing what parchment is, but Lord Peter Wimsey's interest in antique books taught me a good deal more because I had to look up some words.

Edit: I forgot to add my point, which was that reading is good for you, because you invariably learn something.